The neighbourhood also of Wigan is celebrated for its old halls, pre-eminent among which is Ince, the ancient seat of the Gerards, and the subject of another of our sketches. Ince stands about a mile to the south-east of the comparatively modern building of the same name, and in its many gables surmounting the front, and long ranges of windows, is not more tasteful as a work of art than conspicuous to the traveller who is so fortunate as to pass near enough to enjoy the sight of it. Lostock Old Hall, black-and-white, and dated 1563, possesses a handsome stone gateway, and has most of the rooms wainscoted. Standish Hall, three and a half miles N.N.W., is also well worth a visit; and after these time is well given to Pemberton Old Hall, half timbered (two miles W.S.W.), Birchley Hall, Winstanley Hall, and Haigh Hall. Winstanley, built of stone, though partly modernised, retains the ancient transom windows, opposing a quiet and successful resistance to the ravages of time and fashion. Haigh Hall, for many ages the seat of the Bradshaigh family (from which, through females, Lord Lindsay, the distinguished Lancashire author and art-critic, descended), is a stately mansion of various periods--the chapel as old apparently as the reign of Edward II. Placed upon the brow of the hill above the town, it commands a prospect scarcely surpassed by the view from Billinge. [Illustration: HALL IN THE WOOD] The old halls of Manchester and the immediate neighbourhood would a hundred years ago have required many chapters to themselves. It has already been mentioned that a great portion of the original town was "black-and-white," and most of the halls belonging to the local gentry, it would seem, were similar. Those which stood in the way of the fast-striding bricks and mortar of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, if not gone entirely, have been mutilated beyond recognition. In the fields close to Garratt Hall partridges were shot only seventy or eighty years ago: to-day there is scarcely a fragment of it left! Hulme Hall, which stood upon a rise of the red sandstone rock close to the Irwell, overlooking the ancient ford to Ordsall,--once the seat of the loyal and generous Prestwich family,--is remembered by plenty of the living as the point aimed for in summer evenings by those who loved the sight of hedges covered with the white bells of the convolvulus--Galatea's own pretty flower. Workshops now cover the ground; and though Ordsall Hall, its neighbour across the water, not long ago a mile from any public road, is still extant, it is hall only in name. Ordsall, happily, is in the possession of a firm of wealthy manufacturers, who have converted the available portions into a sort of institute for their workpeople.[44] Crumpsall Old Hall; Hough Hall, near Moston; Ancoats Old Hall, now the Ancoats Art Gallery; Barton Old Hall, near Eccles; Urmston Old Hall, and several others, may be named as examples of ancient beauty and